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The techniques I have suggested to use: If a fight is effectively over, stop running it. If a fight is not as challenging as you thought it should be, add in a few monsters When it gets late at night, end the encounter when people start yawning If a character has a nemesis, make minor scene...

I think we're pretty close to agreement here! In your previous notes, I didn't see examples of (a), (b) or (d) above -- a lot of your language was focused on "putting on kid gloves", "avoiding fights going bad" and essentially focusing on (c) above. So thanks for your explanation. Now, just to...

My statement was that your focus on changing the outcome of a combat as the only reason to adapt encounters mid-flow is a strawman. You reject that characterization, but then in the rest of your post you return to it: Again you are implying that the only reason to modify encounters mid-flow is...

As a counterpoint, I have been improvising during combat regularly for several decades and cannot think of a time where it hasn't worked out for the better or at least not made much difference. Well, most of the time I change the encounter parameters or add new features (my usual way of...

For me, the biggest distinguisher of GM styles (as opposed simply to quality) is to ask what they do when an encounter scene starts becoming not fun to play. Is your guiding moral: Keep playing; you as a GM have set the scene up and must see it to its logical conclusion Change a few numbers...

It is fair in one sense, in the sense that you have (possibly unfairly) created an encounter and (possibly unfairly) decided that the bar maid cannot fight back and (possibly unfairly) decided that the damage will automatically kill her and (possibly unfairly) decided to treat the encounter as...

No, it's not a failure to accept the stakes. It is saying that the mechanics of a dice roll are part of the overall decision-making process and that they do not need to be the final step. The adjudication of the results depends on many factors, but most importantly on the style of game you and...

Apologies; if it works for you and your players and harms no one (all of which appear to be true), it is a fine and fun way to play! I meant to use weird in the sense of "unusual" not "outlandish", but you are right to call me on it; sorry for being insulting. I do however feel that you are...

So ... this article is generally correct about some sections of AI. Specifically the sorts of diffusion model that generative tools such as DALL-E, Midjourney and ChatGPT use. However there is a lot more to AI than these tools. In fact, most AI in use nowadays is not described by this article...

You see, for me I just don't see that the difference between "I will fudge numbers up until the rules are focused on combat" and "I will fudge numbers at any time" is particularly strong. It seems weird that you consider that up until initiative is rolled (assuming we're playing D&D) you are...

This implies that for each round of cheering, there are 19 times where the party suffered a TPK and were unable to keep roleplaying their characters. So either you do indeed kill entire parties with high regularity, or you do something as a GM which means that the players are more likely to...

I guess it’s not surprising that those GMs who like strict simulationism are the ones who also tend to like confrontational styles of play. It might be that you need one for the other; if you give yourself the power to change things as you go along, you probably can’t get much fun from a...

OK. Puts professional hat on. The original statement was "I rolled a 20 around 6 times in a row, each one a confirmed crit." So there is initial uncertainty about how many times the dice were rolled. People are not great at this sort of recollection, and while it's not impossible that the...

Oh no. This is important -- I don't decide myself, I ask the players. And typically they are happy with the result. But occasionally not and we work it out. Often these are for OOC reasons. I had a player keep their character alive as there were only a few sessions left in the campaign and...

Almost certainly not. The goal of the game is to have fun, and an absurdly unusual result in favor of the players is almost certainly going to be fun for them, so from an overall point of view, it's a win! It's also adding a roleplaying opportunity -- which I want to do, rather than taking away...

I agree; taking your second point first; when setting up a campaign one question I always ask is "how often should we expect a character to die?" and typically I get an answer of "one or two per year of play time". I'm running Pendragon at the moment, which has a higher rate, but that is because...

A lot depends on what you mean by "fair". Is it fair that I was born in a rich country and do not have to worry about food, whereas someone else is facing death through starvation through no fault of their own? Is it fair to say that both a billionaire and a homeless person must pay $1000 to...

On adapting the Escalation dice from 13th Age to other D&D systems: The advice I've seen is that on the first round the players roll at -1, then each subsequent round their bonus goes up. For me, I'd prefer to see it a little more extreme and also -- I don't like penalizing players, even if...

Yep, pretty much

I've played in multiple 1-20 campaigns, and PF2 is excellent at keeping the game feeling like you are getting more and powerful (because you are) without also making it more work on the players. There are more things you can do, but it's not the PITA to manage that even systems I love (like...